Patti Sapone/The Star-LedgerRutgers President Richard McCormick announces his resignation on Tuesday, May 31 , 2011. He will step down in 2012.

NEW BRUNSWICK — When Rutgers President Richard McCormick steps down next year to return to teaching history, he will be the highest paid professor at the state university, campus officials said Tuesday.

But McCormick’s new $335,000-a-year paycheck wasn’t the result of a long negotiation. Instead, it was set in 2002, when a sentence was inserted into the six-page hiring agreement he signed when he was selected as Rutgers’ new president.

The agreement, approved by the Rutgers Board of Governors, said if McCormick should ever return to teaching at Rutgers his salary could be "no less" than the highest paid faculty member on campus. So, when McCormick announced he was stepping down to become a professor again, the university was legally obligated to pay him more than Norman Samuels, the former Rutgers-Newark provost now earning $320,000 a year as a political science professor.

McCormick earns $550,000 a year as president and is eligible for a $100,000 yearly bonus, though he hasn’t taken the extra money in recent years due to the university’s budget troubles.

Ralph Izzo, chairman of the Board of Governors, said he thought McCormick would be worth his new $335,000 professor’s salary.

"We’re very comfortable with that decision," Izzo said. "We’re looking forward to his continued scholarship and performance at that level."

Rutgers is feuding with its unions, including the faculty union, over a decision last year to freeze the pay of all campus employees because of the university’s budget problems. Union officials argued the move violated their contracts. They filed a complaint with the state Public Employment Relations Commission, which is still arbitrating the case.

Adrienne Eaton, president of Rutgers faculty union, said McCormick’s salary and the pay for other administrators-turned-professors is atypical.

"It is important to remember this salary when the university talks in the future about average salaries or the top of the salary scale for faculty. These ex-administrator salaries can really distort those numbers," Eaton said.

Faculty with professor II titles, the highest rank at Rutgers, earn an average of $175,229 a year, a campus spokesman said. Other university employees can be paid much more. Football coach Greg Schiano’s pay tops $2 million, once bonuses and other compensation are added.

McCormick officially submitted his resignation Tuesday, at a closed door meeting of the Rutgers Board of Governors in New Brunswick. At a crowded press conference afterward, he said he will take a year-long paid sabbatical at the end of the 2011-2012 school year, then return to teaching in 2013.

The president said he and his wife, Joan, began talking about his stepping down a year ago, after they adopted their now-16-month-old daughter, Katie.

"We were determined to do it on our own time frame and our own terms," McCormick said of his decision to step down, as Katie, dressed in a red Rutgers dress, played with her mother in the back of the room.

After nearly a decade as president, McCormick said he was looking forward to returning to his academic specialty — American political history. He began his career teaching at Rutgers in 1976. He also hopes to use his higher education experience to teach courses in the graduate education school.

McCormick deferred questions about his pay to Izzo.

"My compensation decision, like everybody’s compensation decision, is made by those to whom I report," McCormick said.

Francis Lawrence, McCormick’s predecessor, was also the university’s highest-paid professor when he returned to the faculty in 2002. He was paid $225,000 a year as a professor, not much less than the $287,000 a year he earned as president.

McCormick said he doesn’t plan to slow down in his final year in office. He will continue to look for donors for Rutgers’ $1 billion fundraising campaign and push for the state to add a bond question to the 2012 ballot for more funding for the state’s colleges and universities.

He also wants to secure a medical school for Rutgers. A state task force headed by former Gov. Tom Kean submitted a proposal last year that would transfer one of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey’s medical schools to Rutgers.

McCormick isn’t sure where he will end up after he gives up his plush corner office in Old Queens. But he said he wouldn’t mind going back to Van Dyck Hall, the 80-year-old building that houses the history department.

"I had an office in the basement of Van Dyck for years and I could do it again," McCormick said.